But this isn't what space actually looks like to the naked eye.

When astronomers process images, sometimes they'll run the raw images through filters to highlight the features that they're studying. Even if they use red, blue, and green filters of visible light, often they'll assign those colors to highlight things like oxygen, hydrogen or whatever they're studying in the image.

The resulting image is in color, but it looks nothing like what we'd see with our own eyes.

"We often use color as a tool, whether it is to enhance an object's detail or to visualize what ordinarily could never be seen by the human eye," NASA explained on the agency's Hubble site.

So what does space actually look like?

Well, we can get pretty close to true-color images if the goal is to create a visually accurate depiction.

Here are four examples of true-color images — or, at least, as close as we can get.

Dwarf planet Ceres:

NASA's Mars Curiosity rover has a color camera on it, so we've gotten some pretty accurate photos of the surface of Mars:

Otherwise, most raw images aren't as colorful. "Creating color images out of the original black-and-white exposures is equal parts art and science," NASA wrote.

"We actually try to avoid the term 'true color' because nobody really knows precisely what the 'truth' is on Mars," Jim Bell, lead scientist for the Pancam color imaging system on the Mars Exploration Rovers, told Universe Today. "Colors change from moment to moment. It's a dynamic thing. We try not to draw the line that hard by saying, 'This is the truth!'"

The bottom line: We won't know what it really looks like until we go there and see it with our own eyes.